Stupidity Abounds in Flyer Land!

Congratulations to Sam Carchidi, who wrote what has to be one of the stupidest paragraphs I’ve ever read:

Despite an awful start, the Flyers enter Tuesday’s game against visiting Anaheim just five points out of a playoff spot and with two games in hand on Carolina, the team holding that position.

“Our division has been struggling at the start of the year,” center Sean Couturier said after Tuesday’s morning skate at the Wells Fargo Center. “We’re lucky we’re in that situation and we have to take advantage of it.”

I took a lot of shit last week when I criticized Claude Giroux for saying how the Flyers were fortunate to only be six points out of a playoff spot after eight games. I still think it was a dumb quote – because it’s nearly impossibly to be more than six points out after only eight games – but Giroux is the captain and he was just doing his job. Maybe I should have laid off a bit.

But there’s no excuse for the same sort of stupidity from a person who is actually paid to write words about a hockey team for a living. First of all, it’s October 29. Any article about points out of a playoff spot is borderline insulting. And then saying that the Flyers are just five points out demonstrates a total lack of mathematical logic. Sure, their division is the worst in hockey right now and they’re only five points out (after 10 games, mind you), but there are also four teams between them and a playoff spot, which is more than there would be in the Western Conference, where there are only seven teams, instead of eight, in each division.

There’s literally nothing lucky about a 3-7 start. Of course they could turn things around and even win the division, because they’ve only played 10 games. But there’s no reason anyone should be celebrating the only-ness of how many points out of a playoff spot they are. Being five or six points out after only eight or 10 games indicates a horrific start. Nothing more. The standings are not even worth talking about, let alone trying to find the silver lining in them.

This is the sort of thing that happens when a writer will eagerly regurgitate whatever nonseny nonsense players spew in a locker room.

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Carchidi’s original headline was: Flyers Lucky to be in Playoff Hunt. He changed it after getting harassed on Twitter:

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Speaking of stupidity. This picture of the Flyers’ line combinations, also tweeted by Carchidi, reveals that someone in the Flyers’ locker room doesn’t know how to spell:

They were looking for Timonen, one M, and Grossmann, two Ns.